Cruz team targets Trump-Putin lovefest

Ted Cruz's foreign policy team is taking aim at Donald Trump's bromance with Vladimir Putin as it courts wary anti-Trump elements within the Republican establishment.

Daniel Vajdich, a member of Cruz’s recently announced national security team, blasted out an email last week inviting “GOP Russia hands” to join a Ted Cruz Russia Working Group, slamming Trump’s praise for the Russian president last year and asking for help “pushing back against Donald Trump’s dangerous Russia policy.”

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Cruz’s foreign policy worldview — from his call to “carpet bomb” ISIS to some of his advisers’ connections to the anti-Islamist fringe — is just one of the characteristics that puts him at odds with the establishment wing of the Republican Party.

But when it comes to Russia and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Texas senator is far more in tune with his GOP colleagues – some of whom are reluctantly embracing his candidacy as the only viable alternative to Trump. And Vajdich wants to draw on that.

“Some of you may have qualms with [Cruz’s] tactics in the Senate, positions on various domestic issues, or proposed policies in say Syria,” Vajdich wrote in the email, which was obtained by POLITICO. “But I very much doubt anyone receiving this email disagrees with his commitment to counter Russian aggression, reinvigorate NATO, and undermine Putin’s authoritarianism domestically.”

Vajdich, who advised Scott Walker before the Wisconsin governor dropped out of the GOP race, told POLITICO that six or seven experts have signed up for the working group and that he expects it to expand. He declined to give names. Cruz senior foreign policy adviser Victoria Coates recruited Vajdich, who is president of a D.C.-based consulting shop, to join the Cruz team.

“I think there are a lot of opportunities for the campaign to really drill down on the fact that the two [Trump and Putin] share this authoritarian instinct, which is what scares me about Donald Trump,” Vajdich told POLITICO. “I’ll do everything I can in terms of engaging with the communications team to encourage some sort of advertising campaign to make people understand why Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin get along.”

The idea is to capitalize on the GOP foreign policy wing’s disenchantment with the party’s surprise front-runner, who Vajdich — echoing many others in the party — says is “neither a conservative nor a Republican.”

He made a point last year of complimenting Putin despite his incursions into Crimea and Ukraine and his alleged involvement in the murders of several journalists — drawing a rebuke in December from Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who last week said that he would vote for Cruz in the Utah caucus.

Trump said Putin is “very bright” and “talented without doubt.” And after Putin offered kind words for Trump last year, Trump told ABC last December that “it is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

“This is unfortunately the reality that our party faces,” Vajdich wrote in his email. “Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have vastly different attitudes toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia and I have decided to do everything I can to ensure their policy prescriptions diverge as much as possible.”

Vajdich, an Atlantic Council senior fellow who previously worked as as top Europe staffer to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, recounts in the email that Cruz sought to send lethal military assistance to Ukraine after Russia invaded the country in 2014. He notes that Cruz co-sponsored a bill from committee leaders (which Vajdich says he helped write) to increase sanctions on Russia’s energy, defense and financial sectors.

Cruz supported the bill “even though he faced severe pressure from a number of industries and corporate interests to put a hold on the legislation, which was eventually signed into law,” Vajdich writes.

In a speech two years ago, Cruz called for Russia to return territory that had been annexed that year. The first-term Republican senator also said in an interview in 2014 that Putin was “taking advantage of President Obama’s foreign policy blunders to expand [Russia's] influence, and I think he is bound and determined to do as much as he can to expand Russia’s sphere of influence and attempt to reassemble the old Soviet Union.” In that interview, Cruz also took a shot at President Barack Obama for not speaking out against Russia’s human rights violations.

Not everyone is convinced that banding together against Trump on foreign policy is the right move. Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who is now executive director of the McCain Institute, says that even though he agrees with Vajdich on the substance and sees Trump’s foreign policy views as “crazy,” he worries that a letter like Vajdich’s is risky.

“It becomes more about taking sides instead of articulating our values and interests,” he said. “Somebody is going to be elected the president of the United States, and I would hope that that person has access to the best and brightest minds and is willing to listen them.”

He also worries that this sort of missive only burnishes the GOP front-runner’s anti-establishment credentials. (Volker says he has been asked by several campaigns to join their foreign policy teams but that he has declined to publicly affiliate with any because his institute is bipartisan and funded by a public university, Arizona State University.)